Dover

By Donna P. Hearn

Through the years, Dover s landscape has been greatly shaped by the contributions of its many influential residents. Upon his arrival, Richard Sackett, the first English settler in eastern Dutchess County, gazed at the soaring hillsides and gave the town its current name. Dover s most important and pivotal event occurred in 1731, when it hosted representatives at an interstate boundary conference. That indenture signing set the judicial line between the colony of Connecticut and the province of New York. After 1845, the railroad exported iron and brought artists like Asher Durand, whose painting of Dover s plains hangs today in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. With the train came tourists and painters, who were drawn to the sites they saw in Durand s works. In the 20th century, the area changed again as old farms disappeared and new industry moved into town. While the community sent men to war and compassionately housed the mentally ill, the Dover Drag Strip made history as one of the first big drag racing tracks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Nov 17, 2008
• ISBN: 9781439621738

Donna P. Hearn

Town historian Donna P. Hearn has brought together an unprecedented collection of vintage images for Dover. She has utilized extensive research and resources from the Dover Historical Society, town archives, and private collections of local residents.

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collection.

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the town of Dover, a small community located in eastern Dutchess County along the western boundary of Connecticut. Steep ridges surrounding Dover and other eastern towns created the narrow Harlem Valley, where Dover occupies the central location. There, a quarter century after Henry Hudson sailed up the river for the Dutch, Dover’s earliest legend of refuge occurred amid ruins of war, betrayal, and death, as the Pequot Chief Sassacus fled New England during the first Pequot War in 1637. In a steep western hillside, Sassacus and his band found refuge in a hidden cave whose waters flowed to the Housatonic River.

Although Dover’s recorded history began as a part of Beekman’s patent, its eastern border with Connecticut remained uncertain. European colonization created disputes between New England and the Dutch where charters and grants overlapped. When the Duke of York conquered New Netherlands in 1664, boundary disputes began with New York, as earlier agreements failed to resolve the problem. In 1731, Connecticut and New York held a boundary conference in Dover where representatives signed an indenture swapping the equivalent lands, creating today’s interstate boundary. In 1737, Connecticut organized townships east of the Housatonic River in its western lands along the boundary. On the New York side, the Beekman precinct population doubled by 1748, as Quakers settled the Oblong. Squatters and a band of Colonial counterfeiters soon inhabited the remaining mountainous lands. Colonial highways crossed in Dover. Stagecoaches traveling from New York City to Bennington, Vermont, crossed routes from the Hudson River ports in Fishkill and Poughkeepsie to Hartford. During the American Revolution, the Morehouse Tavern provided rest and respite for Gen. George Washington and other war leaders and dignitaries. There, Col. Andrew Morehouse received information from Enoch Crosby, America’s first spy.

Dover separated from Pawling in 1807 and held its first town meeting in John Preston’s home. Farmlands dotted the valley and sections of Chestnut Ridge, while small sustenance farms populated East Mountain. As iron demands grew, mountain farms and woodlots were coaled to feed the furnaces. Drover traffic from Vermont to New York increased, as thousands of cattle went to feed the growing city. In the 1840s, area anti-rent protests against government quitrent assessments of tenants and landowners eventually brought about change in the 1846 New York State Constitution, which abolished quitrents, making the deed holder the landowner. When the railroad came in 1850, it changed the town. Railroad transportation ended the cattle drovers traffic but moved iron, grain, and products out while bringing new people to the area. Asher Brown Durand, a founder of the Hudson River School of Art, came to Dover in 1846, captured by its tranquil beauty and verdant landscape. Durand sketched the Dover Stone Church and the plains in Dover. One view of Dover’s plains by Durand is a pivotal painting at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It visually answers the question of where do I come from?

During the Civil War, John Henry Ketcham organized a volunteer regiment while Theodore Timby’s invention revolutionized naval warfare and changed armament strategy forever. Reconstruction requirements drove Dover’s ore mines, beds, and furnaces. When the war’s end demanded memorials to its fallen heroes, Dover’s quarries provided monuments for battlefield cemeteries. Farming and dairy businesses expanded, sending fresh products to nearby New York City and western areas. By then, Ketcham, Dover’s Civil War general, had retired and become a congressman. Locally an 1867 atlas shows numerous neighborhoods and recognized hamlets within the growing community.

During the last of the 19th century, Chestnut Ridge resident Benson J. Lossing was a journalist, editor, and engraver who created works that covered the American Revolution, the Civil War, the Hudson River, and New York State history. Locally he wrote and engraved a work about the Dover Stone Church. Dover’s own congressman served his constituents as well as serving on the public lands and post office committees. His efforts to provide daily mail service to outlying areas became a reality through the rural free delivery system of the U.S. Postal Service. In 1895, Charles P. Morgan’s mill on the Ten Mile River provided electric power to his Dover mill, house, and eight customers. His business provided Dover Plains with streetlights before New York City had them and became Harlem Valley’s grand-daddy portion of the New York State Electric Company. In Wingdale, pure white marble from the South Dover quarries became fashionable as New York City expanded.

Growth continued into the 20th century. As the need for fire protection grew, the J. H. Ketcham Hose Company was organized in 1903. By 1909, the 16 local school districts in town had merged to build a high school. Radio was popular, and one trendy tune at that time was Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet. Webatuck resident Margaret Faulkner often told folks that Silas and Miranda, who drove up to Dover on their golden wedding day, often sat on the front porch veranda of the Faulkner farm. The area’s natural beauty fostered a camp, resort, and tourism industry as families escaped the heat of the city during the summer and fathers commuted by train on weekends. The congressman’s hometown area had become a showplace. Despite the effects of World War I, the area economy remained relatively stable. New York State, seeking a working farm area for a prison, chose the Harlem Valley as a site to house the lawless, provide jobs for other out-of-work New Yorkers, and expand the local economy. In 1912, modifications to the prison created a mental health institution. The Harlem Valley State Hospital doors opened for 32 patients in April 1924 and soon changed the economy of the entire valley. As young Franklin Delano Roosevelt piloted the Taconic State Parkway project and praised the Dover Stone Church to his commissioners, prohibition of alcohol brought stills to the hills. The 1929 stock market crash swelled the state hospital with patients and caregivers. Federal programs brought well-known artists such as Arthur J. E. Powell, George Glenn Newell, and Harry F. Waltman to Dover, where they remained. In the late 1930s, New York City’s photography club judged the Webatuck area the most beautiful in six counties. Next door, Hunt Country Furniture was getting started. After 1941, World War II demands encouraged the federal government to build a defense plant in Dover to extract magnesium from Dover’s marble. The plant employed 200 men. As farming declined, the state hospital became the major employer, caring for up to 5,000 patients. In the 1960s, two area entrepreneurs built the Dover Drag Strip in Wingdale. WABC’s own Cousin Bruce Morrow advertised Sunday drag racing, just 72 miles north of the city. By then, a local Dover teacher had turned artist and created a metal sculpture titled Wingdale, which is mounted in the park opposite Lincoln Center in New